delivered January 9, 2015; revised January 14, 2015
All of us are appalled at the wanton murders at Charlie Hebdo in Paris and the loss of life at the Kosher market in Paris.
Just as we were appalled at the murders of the security guard and two Israelis at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.
Or the murders at the Jewish school in Toulouse that killed a rabbi and three young children.
Or when pro-Palestinian activists use the their free speech to express “death to the Jews” in the Jewish neighborhood of Paris.
For those of us outside of Islam, the attacks Wednesday in Paris differ little from what we saw with Hamas and Hezbollah last summer in Israel--except that they attacked French citizens, just as the train bombing in Madrid attacked Spaniards or the bus bombing in London killed the English.
They might have different names — ISIS, Boko Haram, Hamas, Shabab, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Taliban — but all of them--the Islamic fundamentalists-- are driven by the same hatred and blood-thirsty fanaticism fostering a worldwide war against modernity.
As George Packer writes in this week’s New Yorker:
“It’s the same ideology that sent Salman Rushdie into hiding for a decade under a death sentence for writing a novel, then killed his Japanese translator and tried to kill his Italian translator and Norwegian publisher.
“The ideology that murdered three thousand people in the U.S. on September 11, 2001.
“The one that butchered Theo van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam, in 2004, for making a film.
“The one that has brought mass rape and slaughter to the cities and deserts of Syria and Iraq.
“That massacred a hundred and thirty-two children and thirteen adults in a school in Peshawar last month.
“That regularly kills so many Nigerians, especially young ones, that hardly anyone pays attention.”
And of course, all of this is complemented by the intra-Muslim warring between two main sects, the Sunnis and the Shia, where day in and day out we have reports of people blowing themselves up at mosques and other Islamic holy sites.
So much blood. So traumatizing. We block it out because if we let it all in, we simply could not function.
This jihad against Western democracies is against our cherished freedom of expression, our advances in equality of the sexes, our prizing of diversity where all are invited to peaceably practice their beliefs, religious or otherwise, no matter how much any of us condone or reject what the other is saying. Freedoms we hold dear.
I regret to suggest that, as I did in my remarks about Israel on Yom Kippur, that our Western democratic narrative is irreconcilable with that of the Islamic fundamentalists.
There creates a forever struggle between modernity with its free expression, justice under the law, and human rights from the extreme violence of fundamentalists whose answer to these values is bloodshed--always with a Jewish sub-context. The narrative of attention-grabbing small subset of Muslims is that anyone, anybody, anywhere who denigrates their prophet will meet their end, period.
There is no narrative commonality which means that we will be in a forever struggle between protecting the values that we hold dear,
- the values of living in modernity
- the right of free expression
- and justice under the law
Where the rights of women and others are protected
And where those Muslims who practice Islam are free to live in peace with their neighbor. . .
Are the very societies that Islamic fundamentalists are trying to destroy.
What is terror if not to engender great fear, fear that has the ability to change people’s behaviors?
This jihad, this religious war, would return us 1,300 years to a vastly different pre-medieval world governed by uncompromising law. At its core, the Islamic Fundamentalist believes that the goal is to overthrow all democratic governments throughout the world to be replaced with a Caliph with Sharia law, the most extreme form of Islamic legal law derived directly from the Koran.
It is a conflict without boundaries as long as there are democratic countries that are thriving.
Jihad must be condemned by Islamic religious leaders. And it is. Still, those Muslims who condemn jihad are not heard by the perpetrators--for the terrorists want nothing to do with those Muslims who would promulgate peaceful coexistence.
Those Muslims who condemn are speaking to the vast majority of the world’s Muslim population who are not fundamentalist, numbering at approximately one billion people worldwide. By contrast, the terrorists are perhaps one million people. Still, one million people have the ability to do great damage to our modern civilization.
To our ears, as well, we do not hear the condemnation because we are not looking. They are there, the condemnations, but they will never change the motivations of those who are committed to terrorism.
Religious fundamentalists have and will always kill to achieve their goals.
With today’s Islamic war against western values and societies, the level of violence is appalling, the loss of life devastating, and the goals the perpetrators seek are no closer to being realized.
I would venture to say that were we able to bring Mohammed back to life he would be appalled at what is being done in his name, just as Jesus would have been appalled at the Crusades and the millennia of Christian persecution of non-believers.
Remember I suggested that this is a conflict between democratic values and values that would rule the world under fundamentalist law.
It is hard for us, as Jews, to experience a narrative so counter to our way of being in the world. We consider ourselves life intoxicated, of being a people who embraces life in its fullness. We are not a people reduced to solving disputes through vengeance.
Especially for us, a small people, for whom the specter of terror is all too real -- in Israel, in European countries like the United Kingdom and France, even in our homeland.
We, as a people, as a tradition, do not valorize lex talionis, the legal principle an eye for an eye. Rather the rabbis in the Talmud replaced this Biblical precept with compensating an injured party through money. Vengeance only produces more vengeance.
I wish I had a prescription to right this world made so out of kilter by the warped values of Islamic fundamentalists. I don’t.
What is truly frightening is that Islamic fundamentalists will not be stopped. In all of their tentacles they will continue to find ways, both clever and crude, to attempt to terrorize all who will never comport to their ways. Our challenge is to live our lives embracing the freedoms afforded us. Terrorists must not be allowed victories of any kind over the way of life we hold dear.
